What’s my problem, you ask? I’ll tell you. When I kicked the demon out it left a demon-shaped hole in my head like a cartoon character leaving a room in a hurry, and through that hole I can see the unending beauty of the Outside World.

If you knew me, as you read that you would hear the sound in my voice that’s the Running Chainsaw of Irony.

I can’t help that.

But this is what it’s like:

Imagine sitting on the john doing what you gotta when the floor, the walls, and the ceiling all fall away, leaving you hanging out bare-ass naked in the middle of the air. You look around and you see the same thing has happened to everyone else as well. You see everybody in your apartment building, bare-ass naked too, puttering around above you and below you and off to either side, picking noses and scratching and doing everything that primates do when they think nobody’s looking, jerking off and humping one another’s mates and stealing from their own children and shitting in the well and generally being bastards and, all the while, genuinely believing that they’re good people.

And, #^@& me, they’re probably right. Or right enough, as much as it really matters. Because people are dirty, selfish, short-sighted primates, and, by God, they’re all the best examples of that animal that we call people that they can possibly be. Did I mention it hardly matters?

It hardly matters, because way up above is a foot. A foot the size of the moon, the size of the earth itself, and that foot is coming down with all due speed.

I can see all this through the demon-shaped hole in my head, and, on a good day, I can do nothing but laugh and laugh and laugh, laughing the laugh that is the most horrible, mind-rending gleeful laugh you ever hoped to never hear.

Whenever I think I’m going to sit down and write some cool weird original fiction I stumble across something like this magical penis thieves article and realize I’m going to have to try a little harder to top reality for strangeness.

I will note that the above article makes some intriguing mentions concerning certain classifications in the DSM-IV and how the illnesses referenced seem quite a bit more rare in non-Western cultures, indicating a certain amount of bias toward which diagnoses might be “culture bound” and which are more universal. Scan down until you see the phrase “Healthy Migrant Effect”.

In any case, if such things interest you, a couple hours researching Koro might do you some good. Or do you some damage. Depending.

This one time I was at a baseball game, supporting our local Boys of Summer, I suppose, just like I had done as a little girl. The town’s minor league team was a feeder for a not-very-successful major league team. I had fun guessing and gauging the “just having a great time out there doing […]